“Shared Sacrifice” is Stupid

May 19, 2011

RUSH: Glens Falls, New York, with Sean. Hello, sir. Wonderful to have you with us. Hello.

CALLER: I keep hearing on TV and you, ‘We just can’t afford it, and the sacrifice is gonna have to be shared.’ And I’ve got a decent memory. I remember just a couple months ago when we couldn’t have increased taxes on the most wealthy, the people that have made more money over the last decade, over the last 40 years, really —

RUSH: Yeah, yeah.

CALLER: — than anyone else in America.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Well, wages have, you know, kinda remained flat. What I want to know is when Andrea Mitchell, Mrs. Alan Greenspan, and when Rush Limbaugh say we need to share the sacrifice, what kind of sacrifices are you guys making? I mean, really?

RUSH: What do you mean by you guys?

CALLER: Well, like I said, you, Andrea Mitchell, all the rest of the rich folk in the media that love to get up on TV and radio and talk about how the sacrifice must be —

RUSH: I’m not avoiding your question. I’ll answer it here in just a second. I am not a proponent of shared sacrifice. I don’t believe in sacrifice, period. I think that’s an absolutely defensive, stupid, self-defeating way to go about life. This whole sacrifice business is a Democrat trick. It’s nothing more than a political spin game: We must have joint sacrifice. That means we must accept, we must universally accept bad times, must just accept them, and then all share equally in them. Sorry, I don’t participate in recessions. I am not gonna sacrifice to make somebody else feel good. I’m gonna keep doing what I do, and I hope to prosper at every moment of my life. I mean that’s what this country’s all about. Now, what do you think, what kind of sacrifice should I be doing?

CALLER: Well, I just want to know who’s gonna pay for the oil subsidies, and who’s gonna pay for these wonderful wars you love so much? I mean if we’re going to have these things that you want, Rush, somebody has to pay for it, and I’m sick and tired of —

RUSH: Wrong.

CALLER: — the people paying for it are the people making $50,000 a year. You’re making $25 million a year.

RUSH: I don’t look at life the way you do. There’s a reason somebody makes $25 million and there’s a reason somebody makes $25,000, and it’s not the guy who makes $25 million’s fault. There’s a reason and it’s not your job to come along and say that somebody is at fault, and it’s none of your business to come along and say it isn’t right and that somebody has got to make it fair by giving something up. You are destined to fail in your own life if that’s your attitude about success. That somebody’s success is owing to somebody’s misery, therefore the misery must be honored. Wrongo, pal. Somebody in misery’s gotta be shown how to get out of it, not have it shared equally. It’s what I’ve never understood about people on the left. Okay, so you have misery out there, but not everybody’s feeling misery. Unfair. Solution? Make everybody miserable. Ergo, give us liberalism, it works. But sorry, I don’t participate in it.

What is this, wars that I love? I love a safe United States of America and people. I love a country willing to defend itself against those who would do us harm. And sadly, my friend, I’ll tell you something when the next hour starts. Nobody fears this country anymore. Four Americans killed from a hijacked yacht by Somali pirates, and what are we doing about it? We’re worrying about the inequities of sacrifice in America. Nobody fears this country anymore. We’ve got the 5th Fleet in Bahrain. Doesn’t stop what’s going on. Nobody fears this country, and why? Because our esteemed leader is running around apologizing for this country and asking people to forgive us for that period in our past when people feared us. So nobody’s afraid of us. They’re monkeying around with our currency. They’re monkeying around with their currency. The price of oil is skyrocketing, homelessness is on the rise, people are being foreclosed on in this country left and right, and we have an administration that pledged to stop all this, and it’s actually getting worse. Whether you know it or not, we’re all sacrificing what otherwise could be a great life because of liberalism running this country right now. And of all things that you could call here to talk to me about and learn from, you’re sidetracked on $25 million versus $25,000 and somehow it’s unfair to spend money defending the country against people who want to kill you.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I checked the e-mail during the break after this last caller and all this joint sacrifice business, and people are suggesting, ‘Rush, you do sacrifice. Why didn’t you tell that guy how much you pay in taxes?’ That would not be classy, folks. That’s not the way to deal with this. I mean to tell him that I pay more in taxes in one year that he’s gonna earn in his worthless life is not the classy way to do this, because that’s not what this clown actually means by sacrifice. You gotta understand this. Joint sacrifice to liberals means more government. Even now with massive spending, high unemployment, foreclosures, to this liberal that called here and all the rest of them, the problem is not enough government; it’s not enough bureaucrats; not enough government benefits; not enough government. That’s what the left means. The question is, when is it time for Washington to sacrifice? When is it time for unions to sacrifice? When is it time for government to sacrifice? When is it time for bureaucrats to sacrifice? When do they ever sacrifice? When does the government sacrifice? The government never sacrifices. Zilch, zero, nada.

You want to start talking about sacrifice, sacrifice to me means reducing the size of government. Sacrifice means the takers don’t get as much. Sacrifice means the takers stop demanding as much. This is not about rich versus poor. This is about government versus the people, bureaucrats versus the taxpayers, plain and simple. You Democrats and those of you in the country that call yourselves leftists, let me tell you something. The worst thing you ever did was pass Obamacare. The worst thing you ever did. You overreached by a factor of a gazillion. You went too far with that. Look at what you’ve caused. With the simple passage of Obamacare and the undemocratic, fraudulent way you went about it, buying votes, buying off whole states, talking about doing it via budget reconciliation, doing it on Christmas Eve, trick nighttime procedures and so forth, quite simply what has result is the American people say they don’t want you. They don’t want what you have to offer.

The American people simply do not want liberalism. The American people do not want liberals. Look at what happened. You think what’s happening in Wisconsin is coincidence? It’s not. You overreach, and you take over one-sixth of this economy with a bogus, fraudulent, budget breaking, Constitution-violating piece of legislation, and look at the shellacking you got. You lost the House of Representatives. You’re going to lose the Senate and the White House in 2012. You have lost governorships. You lost 700 seats in state legislatures and it’s all coming home to roost. And what’s your solution? Run away. Run away from the job in Wisconsin. Run away from the job now in Indiana. Run away from the job soon in Ohio. The American people do not want you. The American people do not want what you believe. The American people do not want liberalism. You made it plain what liberalism is. It is fraudulent; it is phony; it is lawbreaking; it is cheating; it is insincerity; it’s disingenuousness. It’s on full display with the passage of this health care bill.

Everything about liberalism that people instinctively distrust and don’t like is now plain as day to see. They don’t need their instincts to know. They got real life. And now they can see something also plain as day. All these years Democrats have made it plain that the little guy, that’s who they cared about, the little guy, the downtrodden, the victims of life, and they were made victims by virtue of who? Republicans, conservatives, the rich, the powerful. Yeah, well, who is it the Democrats are siding with now? Who is it, when at a moment of survival for the Democrat Party, where do they go? Not to you, not the voters, not to the population, not to the American people. They stay in bed with the special interest group known as public sector unions. Public sector union guy says to elected Democrat, ‘You’re never gonna work in this state again unless,’ and the ‘unless’ wins, the guy leaves the job, cowardly, walks off, gets on a short little bus and heads to a neighboring state, holed up in a hotel, cowardly afraid to face the little guys for whom supposedly his political existence is aimed at.

So the frauds that you all are, is now plain as day for everybody to see. The American people don’t want you. They don’t want liberalism running the institutions and traditions that define this country’s greatness. They don’t want you and they saw plain as day what you were all about with the health care bill. And now they see what you’re all about with what really matters to you, what your priorities really are, when you walk off the job and try to claim it’s with honor, you claim you’re doing this for the children, you claim you’re doing this for the people. You’ve spent years impugning, slandering, and libeling Republicans, claiming they wanted to cut money for school lunch programs, kick people out of their houses, take their retirement benefits away from them. You lied and lied and lied. You impugned; you libeled; you slandered. You had the referee in this game on your side, the media. So this notion that you were the ones truly compassionate, you were the ones with the big hearts, you’re the ones that really cared about the children, where are the children today in Wisconsin?

Where have the children been with you people in charge? We just read that two-thirds of Wisconsin eighth graders can’t freaking read at an acceptable level? And yet look at what these teachers are being paid and look at their pensions and look at their health care benefits. Take that to the private sector, not only are they fired, they may be in jail for what they’ve done to the children. So you gotta come to grips with something. This country has spoken all the way down to the level of dogcatcher. If the dogcatcher job was Republican versus Democrat, the Democrat dogcatcher lost. It was a steep and deep political shellacking, and so now we see the results of it. Elections have consequences. The people that ran for office against Democrats in November and who were elected have now rolled up their sleeves and are beginning to work. They’re doing the work of the people who elected them. They are not engaged in sabotaging the people.

The Democrats elected in this country, the vast majority of them, have expressly engaged in sabotage against the American people by siding with other Americans whose job it is to squeeze every last dime out of them in what is not anything other than a transfer of wealth. Public sector unions create zilch. They produce zilch. They add zero to the gross national product. It’s simply wealth transfer. It’s simply the redistribution of wealth. And what now has happened is that those from whom the wealth is taken have figured out that the beneficiaries of the transfer now earn twice what they who are earning the money in the first place earn. Once that was learned, once that was figured out, what did you expect to happen? Did you really think that there was so much love and adulation, respect for government workers that no matter how large the shaft job was, that the people producing the money to pay these people would just continue to bow down and say, ‘Oh, please continue to serve us. We love encountering you at the DMV. We can’t wait to see you when we have to go get our health care. We just love seeing you people when we show up at the airport. We love getting patted down while Ahmed sails through and the granny blue hair Bloody Mary gang has to be stripped down to bare nothing looking for a nonexisting weapon while we’re paying all of this.’

The tipping point has been reached here. More than 700 seats in state legislatures went from Democrat to Republican. Hello, Wisconsin. Hello, Indiana. Hello, Ohio.